Deep Waters by Patricia Hall

Author:Patricia Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780107684
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2016-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

Kate O’Donnell sat in an uncomfortably hard chair in a small, slightly smelly interview room with only an opaque window high in the wall opposite her. She had been there, becoming increasingly impatient, for an hour, delivered by a smirking Mason and his taciturn colleague, then apparently ignored. She had nothing to read and had not been offered anything to eat or drink, or even a visit to the lavatory. As the hand on her watch flicked up to the hour she decided that enough was enough, got out of her seat, and opened the door on to an empty corridor. She listened carefully before heading in the direction of faint voices to her left.

The corridor led her to a door and when she opened it she found herself facing a busy office where plain-clothed officers mostly had their heads down over files or glued to telephone receivers. For a second no one appeared to notice her standing at the open door, but eventually it was DS Mason who realized she was there and who hurried over to her.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked, evidently not best pleased to see her. ‘Have you finished with the DCI?’

‘I haven’t even started with the DCI!’ she said. ‘I’ve been sitting there like a lemon doing nothing for an hour. I need a drink and a visit to the lavvy, la, before I burst.’ Mason glanced at his watch and winced.

‘I’ll show you where to go,’ he said. ‘And see if I can find the guv’nor. He’s a busy man.’

Kate scowled at him and followed him back down the empty corridor, where he indicated a door.

‘Go back to the interview room after, petal,’ he said, looking faintly embarrassed, though not as much as Kate thought he should be. ‘I’ll get you a cuppa.’ He was as good as his word and came back with tea and a packet of biscuits.

‘The DCI says he’ll be ten minutes,’ he said, though it was twenty before DCI Jack Baker opened the interview-room door and came in, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, closely followed by Mason.

‘Right, young lady,’ Baker snapped. ‘I want a statement from you about your contacts with Connie Flanagan and an explanation for why you’ve been interfering in police operations in this part of the world. So let’s have it. What were you doing in Southend in the first place?’ Kate placed her empty mug in front of her carefully and met Baker’s belligerent stare full on.

‘I was working,’ she said flatly before outlining her assignment on Canvey Island and how she had come to move on to Southend to seek some help from the East Anglia News.

‘Right, I’ve had a word with that old fool Frank Garside,’ Baker said. ‘I hope you’re paying him a decent whack for his help. I can’t see how they came to send a dolly bird like you to do a man’s job. Anyway, that’s by the by, your boss’s problem I suppose.

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